Charlie and the Automat

My friend, the Automat documentarian, has turned up a great deal of material I never found, including, for example, the existence of a New York automatic restaurant pre-Horn & Hardart, footage of H&H company picnics dating to 1926, and, my favorite, a "transcript of MSS notes relating to Modern Times, found at the Manoir in 2003 in a cupboard which seemed to contain things CC took out of the archives when writing My Autobiography."

It probably hasn't taken you a very great leap of imagination to interpret the "CC," above: it's Charlie Chaplin of course; the Manoir is his Swiss estate, My Autobiography is exactly what you'd expect, and Modern Times is his famous movie about the Machine Age and its discontents.

"Modern Times" is one of my favorite movies, so to discover that Chaplin thought of including the Automat therein really tickles me. But it's even better than that, because the notes contained in the MSS, though sketchy in more than one sense, so effectively communicate Chaplin's thinking and intent that it takes hardly any imagination at all to watch these never-filmed scenes on your mind's screen starring, of course, Chaplin himself. Having a lot of mental footage of Automats and people using them is not a prerequisite, and since I can't yet share the Automat documentary with you that's just as well. With or without that I think you'll enjoy getting a glimpse into the mind of a master, so without further ado I present to you Charlie Chaplin at work.